Our Partners

Joan Fontaine, the patrician blond actress who rose to stardom as a haunted next spouse in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rebecca” in 1940 and gained an Academy Award for her portrayal of a terrified newlywed in Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” died at her property in Carmel, Calif., on Sunday. She was 96.

Her demise was confirmed by her assistant, Susan Pfeiffer.

Ms. Fontaine was only 24 when she took residence her Oscar in 1942, the youngest greatest-actress winner at the time, but her victory was equally notable due to the fact her more mature sister, Olivia de Havilland, was also a nominee that year. The sisters were estranged for most of their adult life, a predicament Ms. Fontaine once attributed to her obtaining married and won an Oscar just before Ms. de Havilland did.

Until the Hitchcock films, Ms. Fontaine’s movie job had not appeared promising. Even though Ms. de Havilland was starring opposite Errol Flynn in hits like “Captain Blood” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and captured the coveted part of Melanie Hamilton in “Gone With the Wind,” Ms. Fontaine struggled.

In 1937 and 1938, she created ten mainly forgettable pictures, alternating amongst screwball comedies like “Maid’s Evening Out,” in which she starred as a socialite mistaken for a servant, and dramas like “The Gentleman Who Identified Himself,” in which she performed a noble nurse determined to conserve a hobo’s lifestyle.

In 1939, she appeared in two critically acclaimed images. She was a slight participant in “Gunga Din,” with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., but manufactured an impact in the all-feminine ensemble solid of “The Females.” Those roles ended up followed by her job-producing performance in “Rebecca,” which Frank S. Nugent praised in The New York Moments as the film’s “real surprise” and “greatest delight.”

In the 1940s and ’50s, Ms. Fontaine — only a bit typecast as shy, aristocratic or both — had a flourishing movie career, starring opposite the era’s male superstars, which includes Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Electrical power and James Stewart.

She performed the title character in “Jane Eyre” (1944), opposite Orson Welles a passionate obsessive in both “The Constant Nymph” (1943), for which she obtained an Oscar nomination, and Max Oph?ls’s “Letter From an Mysterious Woman” (1948) the prim Woman Rowena in “Ivanhoe” (1952) and a British colonial in the Caribbean in the early race-relations drama “Island in the Sun” (1957). That film’s mere recommendation of an interracial romance, between Ms. Fontaine’s character and Harry Belafonte’s, was regarded as daring.

She made her Broadway debut in 1954, replacing Deborah Kerr as a headmaster’s sensitive spouse who assists a youthful guy affirm his sexuality in “Tea and Sympathy.” Brooks Atkinson, creating in The New York Times, preferred Ms. Kerr but referred to as Ms. Fontaine’s functionality “forceful and thoughtful” and her New York appearance “one of the greater lend-lease deals with Hollywood.”

She returned to Broadway as soon as, in the late sixties, changing Julie Harris in the comedy “Forty Carats,” about a center-aged woman’s romance with a more youthful guy.

Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland was born to British dad and mom on Oct. 22, 1917, in Tokyo, exactly where her father, Walter, a cousin of the aviation pioneer Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, was doing work as a patent attorney. In 1919, her mother, the previous Lillian Ruse, moved with her two daughters to Saratoga, Calif., close to San Francisco. The de Havillands divorced, and Lillian married George M. Fontaine, a section store executive, whose surname Joan later on took as her phase title.

Ms. Fontaine, who also briefly utilised the identify Joan Burfield (inspired by a Los Angeles avenue indicator), moved back to Japan at fifteen to stay with her father and to go to the American College there. Returning in 1934, she soon moved to Los Angeles to go after a film career.

Her ultimate huge-monitor roles ended up the heroine’s jaded older sister in “Tender Is the Night” (1962), based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and a terrified British schoolteacher in “The Devil’s Possess,” a 1966 horror film.

Ms. Fontaine married and divorced 4 times. Her initial partner was Brian Aherne, the British-born phase and film actor, whom she married in 1939 and divorced in 1945. She married William Dozier, a movie producer, in 1946, and they had a daughter. Soon after their divorce in 1951, she was married to Collier Younger, a film and television writer-producer, from 1952 to 1961, and Alfred Wright Jr., a Sports Illustrated editor, from 1964 to 1969.

In 1952, she took in a five-yr-old Peruvian woman, Martita Pareja Calderon. When the woman ran absent in her teenagers, Ms. Fontaine was not able to deliver her property simply because she experienced never ever formally adopted the lady in the United States.

Ms. Fontaine is survived by her sister, Ms. de Havilland a daughter, Deborah Dozier Potter of Santa Fe, N.M. and a grandson.

She ongoing performing effectively into her 70s. She appeared in television videos, including “The Users” (1978) and “Crossings” (1986), based mostly on a Danielle Metal novel. A sequence of appearances on the cleaning soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” in 1980 led to a Daytime Emmy nomination. Her final display screen position was as a supportive royal grandmother in “Good King Wenceslas” (1994) on the Loved ones Channel. She also did theater throughout the United States and abroad, but by no means returned to movie.

“Looking back again on Hollywood, looking at it even these days,” Ms. Fontaine wrote in “No Bed of Roses” (Morrow, 1978), her autobiography, “I recognize that 1 fantastic quality it possesses is not the lavishness, the perpetual sunshine, the golden opportunities, but dread.” Just as “careers typically commence by likelihood there,” she observed, “they can evaporate just as rapidly.”